Who is Eustace Tilley? Well, he is the top-hatted twit, invariably described as a “Regency dandy,” who appeared on the cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated February 21, 1925, appeared on the cover of every late-February “anniversary” issue from 1926 through 1993, and has appeared on anniversary covers intermittently since then, albeit sometimes as a burlesque of himself; the peerless underground cartoonist R. Crumb drew him as a pimply teen-ager in 1994, and the canine portraitist William Wegman rendered him as a fop dog in 2000. This week, he makes a return engagement, in his pristine original form.
Who else is Eustace Tilley? Well, he is an imaginary character, existing in art and in print, who has danced through the pages of the magazine for three-quarters of a century—popping up in unexpected corners, even “writing” allegedly humorous articles in the early years, and holding down a weekly gig, never interrupted, atop The Talk of the Town, where, hatless and with quill pen in hand, he disdainfully inspects a sheaf of copy.
And who else is Eustace Tilley? Well, he is one of the most successful and recognizable corporate trademarks in the history of hype. He’s right up there with the Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, and the Energizer bunny—though it is unlikely that he would deign to socialize with such riffraff during his leisure hours. Among magazine trademarks, Eustace has the Playboy Bunny for lunch.
Nevertheless, the question remains: Who is Eustace Tilley? And who invented him?
An old saying, one that is very nearly dead from overuse, has it that a camel is a horse drawn by a committee.This saying conceals a bias against both camels (which are noble beasts, hardy and independent-minded) and committees (which have produced many useful items over the years, from the King James Bible to the United States Constitution). Eustace Tilley is a committee product. Corey Ford, a writer and a pal of The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, gave him his name. Ross himself gave him his currency, by relentlessly putting him in the magazine. But Eustace’s main creator was Rea Irvin.
Who was Rea Irvin? He was The New Yorker’s first art editor, but that title barely begins to suggest his importance to the magazine. Not only did Irvin draw Eustace (who did not yet have a name) for the first cover; he was also the genius behind virtually the entire look of the magazine, then and now. He designed the typeface that, in slightly varying versions, has from the beginning been used for the magazine’s logo and for its principal headlines, and which you see throughout this Web site. He chose the magazine’s text type. He designed the classically simple three-column layout. He commissioned the covers—those, that is, which he did not draw himself. He was instrumental in inventing the one-line gag cartoon, The New Yorker’s signature contribution to comic art. (Before Irvin, magazine cartoons were generally just illustrated jokes, with corny captions in dialogue that occupied nearly as much space as the drawing itself.) When Ross tapped him, Irvin had no idea that he was about to make magazine history. He had recently been fired as art director of the magazine Life—Life, the humor magazine, not the large-format photojournalistic weekly that would later be founded by Henry R. Luce, of Time fame—and was looking for something to do while he searched for a real job. (Irvin figured that The New Yorker would probably fold after a few issues.)
The look that Irvin gave The New Yorker was so distinctive and so successful that it has survived, in its essentials, for seventy-six years. The clean, all-caps, Art Deco typeface—whose name, naturally, is Irvin—beautifully captured the Jazz Age but long outlived it. The gag cartoon is going stronger than ever. And Eustace Tilley, of course, rules. ♦
